The City of Nowhere
by unamuerte
Summary: Gotham has been semi-destroyed and cut-off from the world. A woman returns to rediscover her childhood past in the rubble...but instead discovers a new Gotham ruled by the Joker and co. In Batman's absence, the woman is drawn into the spiral of crime...
1. Gotham Reborn

_**Disclaimer: **Don't own Batman or anything Batman related. But I do own my imagination!_

_**A/N: L**ike it or lump it this is my version of Gotham. Batman has gone away for a while to make way for the Joker. And my little nameless character will be thrown in his pathway mwahahaha. Read and review so I can give her a name and life!_

Twenty-four years old and I hadn't seen the city since I was a child. Somehow, perhaps in the dreams I had dreamed in the nights leading up to my arrival here, I had expected the City to be the same. It wasn't though. It wouldn't ever be the same. Not since the Earthquake. Not since Batman left the City to its own devices. To run rampart along whatever paths it picked and chose.

Gotham city had changed, but not in the way a city both shrinks and intensifies when you outgrow your childish view of the world. What I saw was no longer the Gotham that I had imagined for fifteen years in my dreams. What I saw was worse. Far from the jagged streets and cantilevered skylines, the fires and broken buildings that puckered my sleeping hours, the Gotham that confronted me was another kind of terrifying. I did not know until that moment, but I discovered something, looking down from the chopper at my new home. Emptiness is horrifying, perhaps as horrifying as a war zone.

I knew, looking down on those deserted streets.

Something terrible had possessed Gotham, and it was not the Earthquake. Probably not even the gangs and vigilantes, for they had always been there, born in the seams of Gotham's very beginnings as a city. No, missing from Gotham were voices. There was no sound of shouting, either happy or terrified. No traffic filled block after block, demanding lights to change, clogging the skyline with petrol fumes. There was none of that. Rubbish was now the only thing clogging the streets, and the rush of the wind as it pushed its way through every broken window and shop corner.

Missing from Gotham was Batman. Or at least the idea of him.

I didn't believe in the masked vigilante, never had. But whatever story the media had spun on him, had worked. I could remember a time stretching back into my childhood when my mother walked me on the streets sometimes. When I wasn't forced to hide in our apartment, staring down at the city through the curtains. Those times were bad, because the fibres of Gotham had always been disturbed. But the crime then wasn't like anything compared to today. Or what led up to today.

Most sensible people would not have stayed. But there were those who stayed. As empty as the streets appeared, I knew people had stayed. There were accounts of whole families living in underground basements beneath the city, but I didn't believe it. The only people who survived there stayed because they liked it. Because they thrived on emptiness. Perhaps even Gotham's worst criminals couldn't stand the silence. It would take a special kind of mad-man to settle down into a holocaust.

Most people, knowing what I knew, would not have returned. All bridges and roads that led into Gotham had been cut off. After the Earthquake, the Government had simply decided Gotham wasn't worth the wealth to bother repairing. The normal people, the innocents, had been evacuated. Sent to live out there remaining days in some other underbelly. The others, the freaks, outcasts and undesirables, had been left to rot within Gotham's smouldering remains. It was a form of murder, but to the Government it was a form of good luck. A way of cleansing the population of evil without being evil. They didn't need to get out torture devices and prison cells. They simply cut off Gotham the way a villain might cut off their finger in order to get out of gaol. It was practical, necessary and _relatively _painless. In theory.

I liked to think that those kind of plans snapped back at people. You could only shut Satan out of paradise for so long. Eventually, he would find a way in. The Government might try to quarantine hell, but Gotham City would find a way to break loose.

Getting into hell wasn't that hard. I paid a lot of money to the right people, and after only five days of negotiations, found myself passenger seat in a chopper bound for the heart of Gotham. Yeah. I wasn't a sensible person. Not normal. Sane? Sanity is relative. A hermit on a desert island might consider himself perfectly sane, but simply prefers the company of coconuts to people. We would consider him a nut-job.

I couldn't explain to you why I returned. In another city a few kilometres away, I was a journalist writing on the city's daily criminal events. Nothing compared to what Gotham was of course. Not that I had thought about Gotham much those fifteen years, at least, not in the daylight hours.

It happened quite naturally, as any natural disaster does. I woke up one day and discovered Gotham all over the news. Hit by an Earthquake…evacuated….quarantined by the Government. Now a ghost-city.

I waited as long as I could. Two, three months maybe. In the end the call was irresistible.

In the end I came back to it…back here...as a moth must follow the moon. Eager to find out what fuelled the heart of Gotham's madness.

Most normal people block out any thoughts of danger and suffering. But I was not sensible. I was the kind of stupid girl who found danger thrilling….the type who marries prisoners on death row…the kind to wander the city at night, because it thrills her to find her life in possible peril.

Yes…danger thrilled me….until I discovered how far Gotham's labyrinth of crime and corruption went….how dark the pathways descended. Then I began to regret my decision. But as any Gotham dweller will tell you, once you surrender yourself into the hands that run this city…

….the hands that tighten the noose around your neck will never let you leave.

* * *


	2. Settling In

_**A/N: **This is going to be my OC version of Harley Quinn....in other words, she's going to have 'a' relationship with the Joker....but it won't really be reciprocated love, ok guys =D _

_I __don't know about you, but I just don't see the Joker loving ANYONE. Not bashing other HQ fics, I think they're great. But seriously. In my Jokerverse, the Joker isn't-going-to-give-a-shit if you cry or faint or get a little scratch. He's the Joker!!!_

_Ranting aside, this is going to be a longish fic, so please be patient. I'm going to introduce the Joker very soon. All good things come to those who wait!_

**Chapter Two: Settling In**

It was mid-afternoon by the time the chopper set down on one of Gotham's abandoned sky-scrapers. I'd studied a schematic of the city before I'd left and had already decided which abandoned building I was going to live in. Of course, I'd had to pick a building relatively unscathed by the disaster, and miraculously, this was one of them.

I smiled as the chopper landed carefully within the yellow circle. _Thornton Towers. _One of the premiere hotels in Gotham. Of course, I'd never been able to afford such a hotel, even on my journalist's wage, so it was the naturally perverse thing to want to stay there. Only now its inhabitants would number more in ghosts and pigeons than the actual living.

I looked around me, considering the finely constructed conservatories that had once shaped the perimeter of the building's roof. Now, most of the glass was smashed (by vandals, not the earthquake) and the plants burned. But you could tell how modern and glamorous it would have once looked.

In its hey-day, the hotel had been owned by Philip Thornton, a thoroughly corrupt businessman who had built his empire on insider trading. Well, until he was undone by a mysterious vigilante. Gotham's Knight. It had happened shortly before the earthquake, and Thornton was going to be arrested and put in Gotham's maximum security prison (there were a lot of people who wanted to lynch Thornton). But the earthquake had intervened and Thornton had escaped out of the city in his private chopper.

'This alright?' The pilot had to yell over the roar of the engine.

I nodded. 'Perfect.' I tossed my bags out and jumped down. On the horizon the sky had turned a chiselled grey fused with the red of sunset. There was a storm on its way.

'Are you sure?' The pilot was offering me a second chance to escape the bombshell. The aftermath. The holocaust. Whatever people were calling Gotham these days.

I nodded again; this time sticking my thumb in the air in case he couldn't tell how determined I was.

'This is the last ride,' he shouted over the roar. 'You'll be stuck –'

I waved him off with my hand, grinning. He shook his head, and slowly took off up into the air. It wasn't hard to tell what he was thinking. _Crazy-assed woman wants to kill herself. _

Of course, I knew how my behaviour must seem to other people. After the earthquake, 75% of Gotham's inhabitants had been flown _out _of the city. Not in. The other 25% either died or went missing. As for those who had survived, and _chose _to remain here, well, you did have to be slightly insane. Most of Gotham's hardened crims chose the earthquake as an escape route, and quickly fled to neighbouring cities to commit their crimes. Only the truly _insane _crims chose to stay. Of those insane criminals, only the most insane stayed _because _they believed the Batman would return.

There'd been a huge uproar, understandably, the week after the earthquake. Once the shock and panic had died down over the tragedy, a new kind of panic set in. Probably about the time when the police searched through the rubble of Arkham Asylum and discovered that not all the patients had died during the quake. Among the missing were quite a few serial rapists, murderers, terrorists and kidnappers.

I knew all this not just because I was watching the news, but because I was reporting it. I hadn't slept more than two hours a night for a week-and-a-half because I'd been glued to my lap-top, recording every new event with a sort of feverish consumption. Of course, what had really stuck a needle in the public was the discovery that two of Arkham's psychotic escapees were in fact the Scarecrow and the Joker. A reward for their persons, dead or alive, had been immediately issued. The reward money was set at $5 million dollars, or $2.5 million each.

That, of course, produced its own set of problems.

In Ridburn, one of the two cities neighbouring Gotham, and the city where I lived, there was chaos. And chaos would probably still be continuing there since I had left.

The substantial reward money meant that sightings of the Scarecrow and Joker had been popping up all over the city. Cranks, crooks, and fraudsters as well as the average Joe looking to make a swift fortune were turning in fake _Crowkers _(the name our newspaper had come up for Scarecrow/Joker doubles) faster than the media could keep up.

But by the end of the week and no true Crowker sightings had eventuated, the reward charade had started to turn ugly. The police had informed us that several people had turned up claiming to have one, or both, of the Crowker's bodies. The bodies had been mutilated, or burnt, of course, beyond supposed recognition. But all DNA tests confirmed the Scarecrow and Joker were still large. The real tragedy of the earthquake was that _more _people were dying in order to catch some worthless scum.

And within all the mad-reporting, people were asking: what happened to Batman? Why wasn't he stopping this? Why hadn't he appeared?

That was _part _of the reason I'd taken my holiday leave early. I couldn't stand the sight of more photos of dead Crowkers sitting on my desk in the morning, waiting for publication. It was turning the search for crims into a circus, and I needed to get off the carousel.

At least for a little while.

Now that there was no noise, no traffic, shouts, news updates; I had Gotham to myself.

I left the bags where they'd fallen and crossed the length of the apartment rooftop to see the view. Those bloody grey storm clouds were inching forward minute by minute, and the buildings around me and in the distance were half-crumbled and collapsed. It was like a derelict ghost town, only it had appeared in just over a week, instead of decades of rust and decay and forgetting.

It was grey and deserted, but it was somehow _beautiful _desertion.

_Incredible, _I couldn't help thinking as I surveyed the full extent of the damage with my own eyes. This had to be the Joker's vision of paradise. Chaos, devastation, destruction.

The clown must be in heaven.

A gun-shot crack rang out somewhere in the city below, and I forgot the Joker.

I craned over the ledge to see if I could pin-point the source of the gun-shot, but knew the venture was hopeless and pulled back. Some people might have been alarmed, terrified even. Others might have felt a sense of responsibility and gone out there to investigate, but with darkness coming on and no street-lamps to light the way – that would just be stupid.

With such stillness, you could probably hear a crime happening on the other side of the city.

Anyone who had lived in Gotham, even as a child, knew that a gun-shot could happen right next-door to your apartment, and you wouldn't investigate. The only way to survive in a city built on crime was to pretend gun-shots were a normal, daily event. Which they were.

After a while you got so good at pretending you didn't mind the gun-shots at all. Business as usual. _Unless _it happened right outside your apartment room. Thenyou might get worried and take the fire stairs out the window.

As it stood now, I didn't think it was likely I'd be bothered by any criminals tonight. I crossed the soot-covered launch pad, picked up my bags, and made my way towards the exit. I'd intended to take the stairs, but for amusement's sake I pressed the button for the elevator.

To my surprise, the button lit up, and I heard the lurching kick of the lift rolling upwards from the bottom floor. I was more than a little surprised. I'd considered all Gotham's power to be cut off from the earthquake. Why was the lift working?

I waited, curiosity overtaking any normal sense of self-preservation. I wanted to see if the lift would work. And it did. The doors jerked open, and a female voice spoke over the eerie silence:

'Please select your floor.'

I stepped in, and chose, a little fatalistically, floor number thirteen.

I was taking my 'holiday' in an abandoned city, I reasoned. I was allowed to make crazy choices.

'Thank you, you have selected, floor number thirteen. Please enjoy the ride.'

I smiled at the strangeness of being alone in an abandoned elevator that was talking to me. And then suddenly I wasn't smiling. The lights flickered, and the lift dropped. Hurtled.

I was hurtling, down past all sixty-five floors in under a few seconds. I wasn't going to ever reach floor thirteen. The lift would hit the ground, and snap my neck.

* * *

_I know I drew the chapter out but if you keep reading, the Joker will appear very soon. =D _

_Reviews please!_


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